Naomi Watts
Thursday, August 21st, 2008Naomi Ellen Watts (born 28 September 1968) is an English actress. She is known for her roles in Mulholland Drive, the film remakes of The Ring, King Kong, Funny Games and her Academy Award-nominated role in the film 21 Grams.
Early life
Watts was born in Shoreham, Kent, England, the daughter of Myfannwy "Miv" (née Roberts), an antiques dealer and costume and set designer, and Peter Watts, a road manager and sound engineer who worked with Pink Floyd (her father’s manic laugh and mother’s comment about "cruisin’ for a bruisin’" are featured in Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon). Watts is pictured, in her mother’s arms, with her father, brother, Pink Floyd, and other crew members, in the hardback edition of Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason’ autobiography of the band Inside Out.
Watts has one brother, Ben Watts, a year older and now a photographer in the United States (she confessed that they fought like cats and dogs as children).
Watts’ parents separated when she was four years old, and when she was seven, her father died. Following her father’s death, her mother relocated the family to Llanfawr Farm, on the Isle of Anglesey in North Wales, where they lived with Watts’ maternal grandparents, Nikki and Hugh Roberts.
Watts described her mother as a hippie "with passive-aggressive tendencies" and no money, who used to threaten to send her and her brother to foster care in order to get her parents to provide for them. Although her mother occasionally moved the family around Wales and England, usually to follow boyfriends, she always ended up returning to Llangefni. Watts lived there until she was 14. The family moved to Sydney in 1982. Her grandmother was Australian, which made it easier to obtain the documentation necessary, since Naomi and her family were entitled to Australian citizenship. Of her nationality, she has said, "I consider myself British and have very happy memories of the UK. I spent the first 14 years of my life in England and Wales and never wanted to leave. When I was in Australia I went back to England a lot". But she has also clarified that she feels very much Australian after having lived there for many years and said, "I consider myself very Australian and very connected to Australia, in fact when people say where is home, I say Australia, because those are my most powerful memories."
In Sydney, Watts attended several acting schools, including North Sydney Girls High School, where her classmates included Nicole Kidman, with whom she is still close. In 1986 she took a break from acting and went to Japan to work as a model, but the experience, which lasted for about four months, was fruitless as Watts did not have the physical requirements for a professional runway model and could only hope to be working in promotions, which did not excite her. Watts describes it as one of the worst periods of her life. Upon returning to Australia, she went to work for a local department store and from there she went to work as assistant fashion editor with an Australian fashion magazine. A casual invitation to participate in a drama workshop rekindled her passion for acting, and prompted her to quit her job and dedicate herself to succeeding as an actress.
Career
Watts’ career began in Australian television, where she appeared in commercials and series, including the melodramas Home and Away and Brides of Christ and the family sitcom Hey Dad..!. She was featured in a supporting role in the acclaimed 1991 Australian indie film Flirting, which starred future Hollywood up-and-comers Nicole Kidman and Thandie Newton. As Watts made the transition from Australia to the United States, she landed a supporting role in the cult 1995 film Tank Girl, playing the part of "Jet Girl".
Finding quality roles in the Hollywood system at first proved difficult for Watts. She appeared in the short-lived series Sleepwalkers and numerous B-list productions such as films like Children of the Corn IV. Gradually, Watts garnered supporting roles in films such as Dangerous Beauty. In 2001 Naomi starred in The Shaft directed by Dick Maas which earned nothing but rotten tomatoes.
In 2001, Watts starred in David Lynch’s highly acclaimed Mulholland Drive. The film, which premiered at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, won her the National Society of Film Critics Award as Best Actress and the National Board of Review award as Breakthrough Performance of the year.
Watts worked with director/screenwriter Scott Coffey on Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, where Watts had her breakout performance. Her next film, the semi-autobiographical Ellie Parker, grew out of the friendship forged between Watts and Coffey. In 2002, she starred in one of the biggest box office hits of that year, the English language remake of the Japanese horror film The Ring. The following year, she starred in the film Ned Kelly opposite Heath Ledger, Orlando Bloom, and Geoffrey Rush; as well as the Merchant-Ivory film Le Divorce with Kate Hudson. Her performance opposite Sean Penn and Benicio del Toro in director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 21 Grams earned Watts her first Academy Award nomination as Best Actress.
She produced and starred in the well-received independent film We Don’t Live Here Anymore. She reunited with Sean Penn and Don Cheadle in The Assassination of Richard Nixon, teamed up with Jude Law and Dustin Hoffman in David O. Russell’s ensemble comedy I ♥ Huckabees, and starred in the sequel to the Ring, The Ring Two. She then starred in the much-anticipated remake of King Kong (2005). The role, which was immortalized by Fay Wray in the original film, proved to be Watts’ most commercially successful film yet. Helmed by The Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson, the film won high praise and grossed $550 million worldwide.
Watts starred in The Painted Veil with Edward Norton and Liev Schreiber, released in December 2006. She has since finished the films Funny Games (a remake of the homonymous Austrian movie by director Michael Haneke) with Tim Roth and David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises with Viggo Mortensen.
The press has labeled her the "queen of remakes" because she has starred in so many remakes, and she is scheduled to star in the remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963). Watts will only state that there have been "discussions" about the "The Birds" remake.
In May 2006, Watts was named a special representative to the U.N. program for HIV/AIDS.
On July 24, 2007, The Courier-Mail reported that Naomi Watts had been cast as Narcissa Malfoy in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, with Stuart Townsend and Joseph Fiennes, the younger brother of Ralph Fiennes (Lord Voldemort), also being cast in unspecified roles. On the next day, representatives of Watts, Townsend and Fiennes said that the rumors were not true.
Personal life
Watts previously dated director Daniel Kirby, playwright Jeff Smeenge, director Stephen Hopkins and Heath Ledger, her co-star in the film Ned Kelly. Since spring 2005, Watts has dated actor Liev Schreiber. The couple’s son, Alexander Pete, was born on July 25, 2007 in Los Angeles.
Watts is a close friend of Benicio del Toro, with whom she co-starred in 21 Grams. After filming The Painted Veil, she became attracted to Buddhism, claiming, "I have some belief but I am not a strict Buddhist or anything yet. There was a lot of excitement and energy there".
Watts is expecting her second child to Liev Schreiber. Watts is friends with actress Isla Fisher. Naomi claims that she wanted to become an actress since watching the film Fame.
Naomi Watts Interview:
GRAHAM FULLER: Are we from the same English town? I’m from Shoreham in Sussex.
NAOMI WATTS: (laughs) I’m from Shoreham in Kent.
GF: The next county along - close enough.
NW: I lived there until I was eight. My father worked as a sound engineer for Pink Floyd so there was a lot of that rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle; I hardly ever saw him. My mum raised my brother Ben (Watts, who photographed Naomi for this story) and me on her own because she split with my dad when I was four. She had no money, so we lived with her parents and her sisters. There are a lot of strong-willed matriarchs in my family. I’m the youngest woman and the shyest of them all. Mum had a series of bad boyfriends, and we moved around with them. There was talk of my mother and father reuniting at one time, but he died when I was about nine and it freaked my mum out. I think she felt she couldn’t bring us up alone and she passive-aggressively threatened my grandparents, saying she would send us to a foster home, so that they would take care of us, which they did.
GF: Where did they live?
NW: They had moved to northeast Wales and we went to live there with them. We took Welsh lessons in a school in the middle of nowhere while everyone else was taking English. Wherever we moved, I would adapt and pick up the regional accent. It’s obviously significant now, my being an actress. Anyway, there was quite a lot of sadness in my childhood, but no lack of love. My mum is a very demonstrative, loving person, but she’s had a really hard life.
GF: Did she remarry?
NW: yes. Then she went on holiday to Australia and felt it was the land of opportunity, so we all emigrated. I was uprooted again, this time to a whole new culture, one that took me a long time to fit into. At school, I hung out with the dorks because I knew they would accept me. It took me a while to find my way to the cool group.
GF: When did you start acting?
NW: Mum put me in drama classes when I was about 14. I’d been going on about it for some time, so maybe it was a way to shut me up. Then I started taking more serious classes. I’d had the desire to act even back in Shoreham.
GF: Do you think it was related somehow to your father’s absence?
NW: Maybe I was lacking some kind of support and needed to be accepted or appreciated. My father had not only left the family, but he’d died, so perhaps as a child I felt doubly abandoned.
GF: Flirting (1991) was the film that got you noticed, right? Along with Nicole Kidman, Thandie Newton and Noah Taylor.
NW: Yeah, though I’d had other parts here and there. I’d taken a break from acting because I’d had a terrible experience modeling in Japan and I swore I’d never be in front of any camera again. Back in Sydney I got a great job producing fashion shoots for a big department store when I was 19. Then I was poached by Follow Me, and Alternative fashion magazine to Vogue. A friend I’d done acting classes with begged me to come to a weekend workshop. I resisted at first, but I did it and had a great time. That was it. On the Monday morning I quit my job and told them I had to follow my dream. Two weeks later I ran into (director) John Duigan at the premiere of Dead Calm (1989). We got to talking and I told him I was an actress and he said I should audition for Flirting. I thought, This could be one of those bullshit lines you hear at a party. But I called, auditioned and got a part. After that I was offered a role in a soap called A Country Practice, but I turned it down.
GF: Why?
NW: Naivete. I felt I didn’t want to get stuck on a soap for two or three years. Everyone thought I was mad. I probably should have done it, but it doesn’t make any difference. Eventually I got a few more high-profile jobs and then I came to Hollywood - again naively.
